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A Spanish cat fight

I
f Spain didn’t exist, we would surely have to invent it; sometimes it can
seem as though we have done. “We” here refers specifically to the
Anglo-Saxon nations: a succession of writer-travellers from Washington
Irving and George Borrow to Ernest Hemingway and Gerald Brenan have helped
shape our sense of what Iberia is like. More recently, anglophone readers
have relied on British scholars like Colin Smith and Paul Preston for their
understanding of the country, its literature and history. So too, to a
remarkable degree, have Spaniards themselves.

Among the more interesting nineteenth-century visitors was the Scottish artist
R. A. M. Stevenson (cousin of the more famous R. L. S.). Praising Spain with
faint damnation, he denied that travelling there was “so bad as many would
have it”. Nor, he added, “are the trains so slow and so dangerous, nor the a
food and wine so unpalatable, as they have been reported, while the approach
to Madrid must take you through the scenery of Velasquez’s pictures”. That
those pictures thrilled him is easy to see, and their renewed fame was
largely thanks to Stevenson’s influence. Velázquez’s works are
extraordinarily modern, Stevenson suggests, anticipating developments in
France of the day: “Of all painters, Velasquez was the one who tampered
least with the integrity of his impression of the world”. While in one way
making a nonsense of the notion of a backward or “primitive” Spain,
Stevenson’s book on Velasquez (1895) still casts its author as an explorer,
as the artist’s discoverer. And if Stevenson’s love of the Spanish landscape
is unmistakable, so too is his way of seeing it at one aestheticized remove.
Having praised Velázquez for his refusal to allow artistic conventions to
shape his perceptions, he lets the paintings construct his own view of
Spain.

Madrid is another matter. Even the master cannot reconcile Stevenson to what
he dismisses as “the deadly capital of Spain”. By the time Anthony
Whitelands arrives, in the opening pages of Eduardo Mendoza’s new novel,
Madrid is more literally “deadly” than Stevenson could have imagined. It is
the spring of 1936, and the country is in crisis, with mounting fears of
leftist revolution or rightist coup. Whitelands, a stiff English art
historian, specializes in the paintings of the Spanish Golden Age and
particularly Velázquez. He is in the city on a secret mission, invited to
value an aristocratic family’s collection for sale in London. His patrons
apparently hope the proceeds will give them their ticket out of an
increasingly dangerous situation. Whitelands has been drawn by the hint that
a work of great value may be involved and hopes this will provide a
much-needed fillip for a stagnating career. His motives may be tinged with
opportunism, but he is ingenuously English in his view of Spain as “a land
of passion, of violence, of grand individual gestures”. Green and fertile
Britain may be, he writes in a letter home, but its climate dampens the
human spirit; its lowering clouds have a lowering effect on outlook. By
contrast, Spain’s scorched earth sets off an “infinite sky” and a “heroic
light”. Here, “where the earth offers nothing”, he rhapsodizes, “men walk
with their heads raised, looking off to the horizon”.

Every step he takes is under observation by secret policemen or by agents of
one or another of the factions with an interest in the destiny of a Spain
Every step he takes is under observation by secret policemen or by agents of
one or another of the factions with an interest in the destiny of a Spain in
which real and fictional figures appear side by side. Art is incidental to
most of these players. If rumours that the Duke of Igualada’s collection
includes a missing Velázquez prove well founded, there is a fortune to be
made. The more so if it is the artist’s own personal – and more revealing –
version of the Rokeby Venus. Will the money really finance the family’s
escape, or will it be used to buy guns for the Falange? That quasi-fascist
group is led (as it was historically) by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the
son of the late dictator, though here he is also the fiancé of the Duke’s
elder daughter Francisca (Paquita). Whitelands is bewitched by both:
romantically smitten by the enigmatic aristocratic beauty; won over by the
charisma of her suitor. Before he meets either of them, however, he has
caught a glimpse of their secret life, observing their garden trysts through
the window of the Duke’s study.

Who looks where and who sees what are central questions in Riña de gatos. The
title translates literally as “Cat Fight” – a reference to the deepening
(and essentially undignified) conflict that will end in civil war. Yet
“Cat’s Cradle” might do just as well, so complex is the crisscrossing of
sightlines – and opposing personal and ideological perspectives – in what
otherwise appears a straightforward, fast-moving adventure novel. Mendoza’s
Madrid is a mesh of mutual surveillance. Spying, suspicion, deception and
double bluff have become the norm as the Republic’s state security and
members of various right- and left-wing groups edge around each other,
seeking an advantage – overseen by the representatives of foreign powers.
Whitelands reflects at one point that he is caught in the middle of a set of
concentric circles in which unknown agencies watch one another watching him.
Eavesdroppings, accidental overhearings, coincidental (and
not-so-coincidental) encounters abound as he attempts to find his way
through a social, political and romantic labyrinth which changes with
mesmerizing speed.

What is the Duke of Igualada’s game? What plans does Paquita have for the
family’s foreign visitor as her manner swings back and forth between
flirtation and disdain? What of her younger sister Lilí: a knowing infanta
or an innocent little girl? How did Marranón, a secret policeman, come to be
on the same train as Whitelands when he travelled down to Madrid? Who is
Higinio Zamora Zamorano, the working-class guardian angel who rescues him
from a bar-room brawl and befriends him but remains mysterious, as everybody
in this city does? What of Toñina, the teenage prostitute who, as a
true-life maja or plebeian beauty, may be seen as a lower-class counterpart
not just to the subject of the “new” Velázquez painting but also to Paquita?
And what, taking a slightly wider view, are the gentlemen at the British
embassy up to? Why does “Kolia”, the Soviet agent, want Whitelands dead?
Before he knows it our mild-mannered scholar finds himself the
“collision-point for all the forces of Spanish history”.

The same might of course be said of Madrid at this moment. In taking the
Spanish capital as its setting, Riña de gatos represents a new departure for
Mendoza. Until now, he has been associated in his readers’ minds with
Catalonia – and with his native Barcelona in particular. Publishing his
first novel just a few months before the death of General Franco in 1975,
Mendoza won a special status as the herald of Spain’s transition to
democracy. Harking back to better times in the 1920s, La verdad sobre el
caso Savolta (1975, The Truth About the Savolta Case) seemed ebulliently
democratic with its multiplicity of narrative voices and the range of
resources used – from court proceedings to newspaper reports. La ciudad de
los prodigios (City of Marvels), published in 1980 and also set in
Barcelona, represented a grand energetic celebration of the city. With all
its comic quirks – and its cut corners – the story of Onofre Bouvila’s rise
to riches and power is emblematic of the Barcelona which, as a speculative
developer, Bouvila does so much to build. It is hardly a heroic narrative:
“Society rests on these four pillars”, Bouvila reflects: “ignorance,
negligence, injustice, and folly.” City of Marvels offers plentiful
examples of all these things. The picaresque career of its protagonist is
bounded by the world’s fairs of 1888 and 1929. Mendoza has always had an
interest in such grand civic self-presentations, the fictions they weave and
the realities they reveal. The build-up to the Barcelona Olympics of 1992
sparked the serial publication in 1991 of Sin noticias de Gurb (No News of
Gurb), a science-fiction satire which follows the city’s preparations from
the point of view of a space alien who casts a naively indulgent eye on
administrative chaos and injustice.

Mendoza may have a novelist’s eye for the vagaries of men and women, but he
also has a far from abstract interest in geography. “Before getting down to
any job”, says Onofre Bouvila, “it’s a good idea to get the lay of the
land.” Mendoza seems to follow this precept too. His Barcelona often seems a
mosaic of building plots; a foray into the Catalan countryside, as in El año
del diluvio (1992, The Year of the Flood) shows him assessing the scene –
from its contours and its aspects down to its gullies and watercourses – in
the manner of a surveyor. Not that Mendoza gets much mud on his boots:
however down-to-earth the scene, however squalid the conditions he is
describing, the elegant style, the ironic tone are always there.

We are reminded that the fast and furious plotting, the coincidences, the
twists that go to make a successful adventure novel are also the ingredients
of farceThat distance is certainly maintained in Riña de gatos. Madrid
is for the most part seen through a visitor’s eyes. Although the sense we
are given of the city’s topography is strong, it is at times the more vivid
for being imprecise. One night when he is led through the back streets of
the Spanish capital he thinks he knows, Whitelands feels “doubly foreign”,
with the “stranger’s mixture of deep melancholy and excitement”. One of the
lessons he has learned from his study of Velázquez is that it is possible to
proceed by indirection, to be passionately detached. It is significant that
we should see events in Spain reflected through the experiences of a
slightly Pooterish English protagonist, just as we see the moment of the
country’s downfall reflected in a work of Italian art. Considering how
Titian’s “The Death of Actaeon” might have appeared had Velázquez painted
it, Whitelands is convinced that it would have focused not on Actaeon but on
some “chance witness”, whose face would have shown “amazement, horror or
indifference”. Whitelands is that witness to what may be the death agonies
of Spain. Yet, momentous as the historical issues are and exciting as its
action is, Riña de gatos is by no means a blood-and-thunder thriller.
Instead we are reminded that the fast and furious plotting, the
coincidences, the twists that go to make a successful adventure novel are
also the ingredients of farce. At one point, Whitelands is hunted through
the house of the Duke by not one but three members of the military junta
that is about to bid for power in Spain, among them General Franco; when
José Antonio Primo de Rivera meets him to agree a common strategy, the
future Caudillo seems interested only in discussing the finer points of
English vocabulary and grammar. His republic crumbling around him, President
Manuel Azaña takes time out to regale his officials with his recollections
of a lecture he once attended on Titian’s “Actaeon”.

It was Ramón del Valle-Inclán who first proposed that the “tragic sense of
Spanish life” could be captured only by an aesthetic of “systematic
deformation”. In his play Bohemian Lights (1924), we are told that “the
classic heroes have gone to stroll in callejón del Gato”. Madrid’s “Cat
Alley” was home to Valle-Inclán’s favourite bar, the façade of which was
lined with distorting mirrors. Mendoza’s manner in Riña de gatos owes
something to what became known as the esperpento register, with its
caricaturing of heroic types and its mocking of the grandest modes. Goya
first created this sensibility, Valle-Inclán suggests – and it is easy to
see the relevance of his Caprichos and Disasters of War – though in this
particular cat fight Goya is the dog that doesn’t bark. The most grotesque
treatment Mendoza can imagine for the enormity of his country’s headlong
plunge into war and death is to present it as a sparkling comedy. Tragic
events here are chronicled with cheerful good humour; Spanish civilization
is sent up with the decorous irony we find in Velázquez’s work.

The most tragic aspect of the Spanish Civil War was the frivolity with which
it was embarked on.The novel’s narrator muses in passing on the
paintings Whitelands sees – with an emphasis on the fools and dwarfs. Their
aristocratic-style formal portraits are neither cruel burlesques nor studies
in compassion. Nor are they simply satirical swipes at the monstrous power
of the royal whim. They are also reflections on the other lives these
subjects might have led, or the lives they did lead. Considering the
portrait of “The Jester Don John of Austria”, the narrator reflects on the
general’s dress he wears – like that of the real Don John – the military
paraphernalia strewn around him and the battle in the background. But he
reflects too on the fact that the dwarf is known to have been only a
“part-time buffoon”, brought in to fill an absence or make up numbers as
required. What was he the rest of the time, we wonder. The sense of other
possibilities is always present for Velázquez: his greatest works have a
deep ambiguity at their centre. Is that a picture on the wall, in “Jesus in
the House of Martha and Mary”, or a serving hatch giving on to another room
in which Christ is present? Who is the subject of “Las Meninas”? The
Infanta, the maidservants, the artist himself, or the King and Queen? R. A.
M. Stevenson saw Velázquez’s work as, paradoxically, an art of liberation.
Even with his most formal court scenes we sense that men and women have a
personal dimension, which stays secret, however close the scrutiny; that,
rigid as it is, life is “a chest with a false bottom”.

It is not so odd, then, that this artist, so vivid in recording things the way
they were, should have prompted Ortega y Gasset’s remark that “it’s a
feature of the strange human condition that everything in life could have
been different from the way it was”. Mendoza takes this as his epigraph for
a novel which underlines how heartening – and yet how depressing – that
feature is. If Riña de gatos makes light of tragedy, the most tragic aspect
of the Spanish Civil War was the frivolity with which it was embarked on;
the recklessness with which a nation rushed to its own destruction. If his
novel is a comic confection, it is deadly serious in its import; this
Englishman’s excursion takes us to the very heart of Spain.

Michael Kerrigan’s books include The History of Death, 2007, and, most
recently, The Ancients in Their Own Words, which was published in 2009.